A quote from Google vice-president of Global Ad Operations John Herlihy has been getting some attention in the blogosphere lately. He was quoted as saying “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.” Obviously that’s what Google is banking on, with heavy investments in operating systems for mobile phones (Android) and netbooks (ChromeOS) or whatever notebooks end up evolving into. I think saying desktop computers will be irrelevant in three years is over stating things by quite a bit. It would be more accurate to say that in three years the diversity of net connected devices will increase by a lot. Instead of just desktop computers, notebooks and mobile phones, consumers will have a wider spectrum of devices to choose from like the iPad, net enabled eBook readers, smart-phones on steroids, etc. We’re seeing the early signs of this already.
TechCrunch has a somewhat related article, In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It. With new platforms and OS’s come new design and development challenges. Graceful degradation of the user experience, which never worked well to begin with, won’t cut it when you have many, many levels of degradation to support. User experiences will have to be more specific to a platform. And the fragmented nature of devices outside of the conventional PC will likely not go away.